Itemization in FFXI in unexciting

[Duelle]

Take the poetics caster set for example, like 9 of 11 pieces have accuracy on them. Seems a bit excessive.

This is intentionally bad itemization to encourage people to trudge through content using poetics gear but ultimately aim for gear from final coil. It's more noticeable for some classes more than others, but it's there. If you notice the gear with "good" stats for the most part comes from final coil; as a tank I end up swimming in parry, for example.

I actually hated the gear-swapping aspect of that game. But what's worse, if you did it like you were supposed to, you never actually saw your character fighting. It'd always be invisible while the game loaded the new graphics.

That was more an oversight that the developers did nothing about. My dislike for swaps was known to those who played with me, and I can say it really soured my outlook on XI's combat design.

I have to admit, gear in FFXIV is far to vanilla for my tastes. Every single item you can 'upgrade' to is just the same as before with a recolor and a few extra levels added on. Even the original Guild Wars had more horizontal variety than this game does. The problem is the developers are too scared to add unique and interesting stats in the fear that one piece will be coveted above the others.

Truth be told this happens anyway, but people turn a blind eye to it for some reason.

Because the ends achieved through gear is to reach whatever stat cap or threshold that needs to be reached in order to progress. BiS as a concept is VERY different from things like the lv51 elemental staves. The former is part of progression, plays into your character growing more powerful and is tied with current content. The latter involves items overbudget for the level at which players can use them, and end up hurting future itemization or helping in power creep. Not to mention all those wasted database slots for items and the art assets involved.

[Krindor]

Pvp gear is worthless in front lines due to the Ilvl sync, that said, since they added an extra stat to it, some i110 pvp gear is better than it's soldiery or high allagan counterpart.

Majority of the i90+ PvP gear are better than their PvE counterpart due to not having any accuracy on it, 100 accuracy turned into something else is quite big of a difference.

On topic, I agree with the OP, the effect secondary stats have here is low, even compared to WoW.

[Magis]

In before you get torn apart for your thread title.

Had to do a double take lol. OP might want to edit his title/post with a clarification. Anyway, I agree with him.

[Corfish]

snip

Personally I don't care if the progression if vertical or horizontal. Every game I have played with horizontal progression gets dictated to death by the players, and if you try to do something that the players don't declare optimal, you get told contstantly how why you are wrong and making it worse for everyone else.

The FFXIV community seems to have an older average user base, so hopefully people wouldn't get mad at others for builds not considered optimal, but who knows. Either way, horizontal progression isn't as super special as people want it to be.

[Deathscythe343]

This is intentionally bad itemization to encourage people to trudge through content using poetics gear but ultimately aim for gear from final coil. It's more noticeable for some classes more than others, but it's there. If you notice the gear with "good" stats for the most part comes from final coil; as a tank I end up swimming in parry, for example.

Yes, but considering my example, this is still awful. A casual person that may never step foot in coil deserves the same chance at gear with better itemized stats on it as the raider.

[BlaiseArath]

They fixed the blinking while gear swapping thing a while back btw in XI... a looooooooooooooooooooot longer ago if you used Blinkmenot. But officially its fixed now with "Lock style".

Also, As a DD job, I never "Blinked so much I was invisible the entire time" in any event. Maybe on a mage job if you played it pretty hardcore, but melee only had really 3 sets... TP Phase, WS, and PDT/GotHate gear, and for most of XI's life span, there was a good long period between TP and WS swapping... not until around Abyssea did we get the influx of hastebuffs that got us getting TP almost quicker than we could spend it.

Unless your computer was crap and it just took you forever to load models or something, then maybe yah. Or during Besieged.